Fighting The Pipeline

As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a legal fight with my Band Council and have been using Steemit in order to raise the funds I need to pay my lawyers; which are way more expensive than they lead you to believe on T.V. Shows.

Currently we need to raise 2500 Canadian Dollars for the legal bill, which is actually only 1974 or so US dollars right now so roughly 2000 Steem… so if anybody wants to give us 2000 steem that would be really, really awesome of you.

I met with a Gentleman on Monday from up North, I can’t say his name because I don’t have his permission to name it here (although I’m going to try and get him on Steem) but currently he is an individual that’s raising funds to help fight BC Hydro on the Site C Damn in Court. Quick briefer on that, BC Hydro in Canada wants to build a 13 Billion dollar damn up North that’ll flood farms and First Nations territory… it’s also something the province doesn’t need for power as we already have a surplus and nobody to sell the extra to.

The quick brief on my case is my Band Council has been embezzling large amounts of money from both INAC funds as well as the Band Revenue that belongs to members; they have also profited greatly from dealing with Kinder Morgan in approving the TransMountain pipeline. My Sister and I have taken them to Court over breach of Fiduciary Duty, along with a lot of other charges.

My meeting with the Gentleman was extremely helpful as he took me through several great ways to fund raise, including dinners and raffles; and is helping us set up a donation site online. The Link will be below.

As part of that help though he has asked me to write a brief history of my Reserve to allow people a little bit more info on who we are; I’m going to write it out here and post it while at the same time sending it to him for his feedback.

So here it is:

The Peters First Nations sits between a large mountain and the Mighty Fraser River about two hours East of Vancouver, if you blink while driving by on Highway you’ll miss it. We’re a member of the subgroup Tait First Nations, Tait being the original name of the Fraser River, as well as being members of the Stolo Nation… Stolo meaning ‘People of The River.’

As The Stolo name suggests, our people have lived along the Fraser River for the last fifteen to twenty thousand years and survived by Fishing, Hunting and farming in small sections of land; really small sections as the area was mostly forest and mountains. Speaking to elders about the situation on our Reserve the term Symbiotic comes up a lot, as a people we were completely dependent on the land therefore it’s on us to protect it from harm; once it goes, we go.

The Stolo Nation Bands are also a member of much larger group of The Coast Salish, which itself is a member of the Salish Territory; many bands of which have also undertaken court challenges against the Kinder Morgan Pipeline.

Currently there are 52 Band members on our reserve as the Band Council has been removing band Members, and not allowing the Children of Band Members who don’t vote for them not to be registered or become Members. Currently there are 110 Natives that are fighting for their rights to be put back on the Membership list, that’s a separate court case from us but we whole heartedly support it and doing our part in moving it forward.

The Band Council’s willingness to remove family members from the Membership role and deny others has given them a confidence in breaking further laws, not even telling the membership they were meeting with Kinder Morgan for nearly a year until it was discovered accidentally by myself at a coffee shop.

Since then they have broken laws, rules and using Band Funds to punish Members for speaking out against them.

This too, is actually against the law.

That’s my write up of the situation; I’ll send it off and any feedback or questions below would be great. Thank-you.

The link to our donations page is https://chuffed.org/project/fnfightskm

I should point out it's a great page as the developers don't take any percentage of the donation.